Andrew Watterson : So in aggregate, we’ll have less hiring this year than last year. And that’s true for every work group except for pilots. And so as we’ve mentioned before, we are pilot constrained in our flying. We’re not flying all of the aircraft where we could. We’re producing all the ASMs we could right now because of the number of pilots not the productivity of pilots. And so as we run our training plan here this year, by the end of next — excuse me, the back half of this year, we’ve told you before that we will no longer be pilot-constrained. And that’s when we’ll start using our full fleet, which is why you see the kind of pop-up in capacity there in the back half of the year. The groups we’ve kind of pre-hired, they don’t have as long as the training footprint as pilots do.
So therefore, the proficiency they get is on the job, so to speak, for some of them. And that’s why you see if you ever look out the window and airport and see a different color vests. Those are people who are still in training but OJT trainings, those who are fully proficient. And so you want them to be out in the network now taking some repetitions, if you will, so that when the capacity comes later in the year, they’ve had more experience. So that’s why you’ll see the numbers coming down as capacity goes up later in the year.
Savi Syth : That’s super helpful. And if I may, just on the — it sounded like from a CapEx standpoint, if you needed to kind of increase in spend on some systems to kind of expedite some of the changes, it would fall within that CapEx. But I was kind of curious from a resource standpoint, do you have that ability to kind of — would you kind of pivot? Or would you be able to kind of increase the amount of tech activity that you do this year?
Bob Jordan : Yeah. We have — for your first question, yes, I think that’s captured in the ranges that we provided, number one. And two, the technology spend in total was already increasing from 2022 — and then three, your technology support is always a mix of employees and contractors and third parties that we use in terms of development. So yeah, we have the ability to flex as needed.
Andrew Watterson : It may not just be IT. It could be equipment. So we’re not prejudging all the extra spend would be IT. It could be the case that we need new or different de-icing trucks or some other infrastructure at the airport. So there is non-tech work that is likely to come out of this. It’s not just tech. There was some tech shortcomings that we’ve addressed, and there could be more tech we do to get ourselves even better. But I think — there will also be some other equipment and other kind of operating changes we make that don’t fall in the technology realm.
Bob Jordan : And again, I think the range is wide. I think all of that would be captured in the CapEx range that we provided.
Savi Syth : Helpful, guys. Thank you
Bob Jordan : Thanks, Savi.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, we have time for one more question, and we will take our last question from Conor Cunningham from Melius Research. Please go ahead.
Conor Cunningham : Hey, everyone. Thanks for the time. Just on the book way estimate that you gave for the first quarter. Curious if you could parse out just how the corporate side of that’s doing. When I think about you selling your network and what Southwest does great domestically, the operations are obviously going to be a big debate there. So just curious on how that commentary has gone so far or that conversation has gone so far.
Ryan Green : Yeah, Conor, it’s Ryan. Of course, immediately following the events, in the days following the event, we were out there talking to kind of general consumers but also talking to corporate travel managers to make sure we had a really good handle on sentiment and what they were needing to hear from us. And so — and those conversations have continued. We’re getting direct feedback from them as well. And from a corporate travel standpoint, as you would expect, they outlined the need for us to be open and transparent about our mitigation plans, what we’re doing to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, making sure that we have plans in place to take care of customers and that we keep them regularly updated. And of course, we’re doing all of those things.
We’re out in the field talking to them all of the time to making sure that they understand what we’re doing. When we ask them about their plans for 2023, the vast majority of those corporate travel managers say that they do not plan to reduce the level of flying on Southwest this year, which I think is a positive sign there. And then when you just look at the bookings from the managed business side as they’ve come in here in the first quarter, for sure, there was an impact in January. It was — those first couple of weeks of the year. Those are big booking months. The hangover was real given the proximity to the event. So there was definitely a hangover or there was an impact in January and some into the first part of February as well. But when I look at February bookings and kind of where we’re — what we’re trending towards here, and we’re kind of getting into the meat of the booking curve for managed business travel.
So we’ve got a good look at it. February is much better than January. In fact, I think February is sequentially better. It will likely turn out that February is going to be sequentially better than where we ended in the fourth quarter. And then, of course, as we get to March, we’re expecting that we’re roughly back to pre-pandemic levels on the managed business side. So we’ve got — we’re certainly focused on that market. That’s a big part of our plans for the year, and we’ll keep after it. But as we get further into the quarter here, I’m encouraged by how resilient they’ve been.
Conor Cunningham : Okay. Appreciate that. And then just on the — you talked about the crew network issue in your prepared remarks and that you’re rolling out a new system in the next couple of weeks. Just curious on how much collaboration you have with your pilots and maybe your other in-flight crew members when looking for a fix there. Did they have an influence at all? Or were you not allowed to talk? Like can you just maybe talk a little bit about the overall culture there with them talking about the fixes? Thank you.
Ryan Green : Well, I think I’m not quite sure if I’m getting your question but I don’t please redirect me. So the system is what we call Sky Solvers. It’s called something else by the manufacturer. It had a functional gap I talked about. We are putting in a fix to that. We call it — upgrade. You will now have the functionality to be able to solve the past crew member problem such that they don’t hamper us in the future. Now this is not something that we — our crew members would be — in their unions would be happy that we fixed this problem because they didn’t like the result of having to fix in there. And so I think from that perspective, they would like — they want to get the job done, so to speak. As far as the culture, we’re in mediation.
We’re in negotiations in the final stages. And so that’s always noisy, if you will. They would like certain changes, and where it’s coming down to is a lot of the changes they’re asking for on the scheduling side, and this was a scheduling issue. And so it kind of dovetailed nicely for them to be able to kind of give input on it. And I think those things we can improve upon, and we’re happy to take those suggestions. And we actually have a big confab with them coming up here in a couple of weeks where they’re going to come in and get our subject matter experts together and talk about how we can improve on the scheduling front. And I even sat down at one of the other unions yesterday, the day before, for the same reason. So we welcome their input.
We want to establish a good professional relationship for them of how we can jointly improve. And so maybe this is a silver lining as we can start down that path.
